It has been determined that "anti-aircraft counter missile technologies" are not deployed in 70% of the cases where aircraft are explosively destroyed by anti-aircraft missiles. Most military jets that are downed by an enemy are destroyed by missiles. Typically, missiles encountered by a military fighter pilot are either radar or infrared guided missiles. If the aircraft pilot detects the missiles being fired at him, he can take countermeasures such as making tight maneuvers, or ejecting flares and metal chaff to confuse either heat or radar guided missiles.
The countermeasures require that a pilot be able to detect a missile before it becomes too close for any countermeasures to be taken. Once the missile is launched, the pilot has only about one second to detect it, and another two seconds to start the countermeasures. Current systems do not provide adequate and timely detection of the launching of a missile.
Modern aircraft are vulnerable to missiles because of active and passive missile guidance techniques. A missile can passively lock onto an aircraft plume, hot metal parts and/or aircraft emissions such as radar and radio. Actively, the missile can be guided to the airplane by its own radar, the aircraft's radar, or laser guidance system.
The aircraft is not usually warned of an oncoming missile because radar warning techniques will give away the position of the aircraft. Present infrared techniques are useless because of the extremely high number of heat sources in the battle field, each of which looks like a missile to existing infrared systems. There may be other aircraft in the area, including friendly aircraft which may produce heat. Ground fire could also cause a false alarm. Even if detected, the pilot must learn of the fired missile early enough to begin his countermeasures.
Present video, infrared, and other detection methods see so much scene detail that it is difficult to differentiate missile launches from the rest of the background scene. This detection problem exists not only for military jets, but also for defensive systems on land targets.